from a constandy renewed pool of Cen- tral and Eastern European immigrants. In the pages of The Appeal to Reason, Sin- clair had implored Chicago's meat work- ers, after an unsuccessful strike, to con- tinue fighting, but he did it from a distance. Now he accepted the maga- zinè s challenge and went to Chicago. He was twenty-six, a slender, pale young man with soft lips and liquid eyes. Zealous and excitable, he suffered from nervous ten- sion, indigestion, and headaches. Away from his demanding and unhappy wife, however (she stayed behind in the cabin), he was content. He walked all over Chi- cago's more dismal neighborhoods, ask- ing questions of workers, union organiz- ers, setdement- house officials. And for days he wandered through the vast Ar- mour facilities in shabby clothes, lunch bucket in hand. There was very litde se- curity at the plant. Noone challenged this oddly inquiring worker. S inclair built his narrative around a family of immigrant Lithuanians who setde in the stockyard area known as Packingtown. They have few illusions about wealth; they expect little more than employment and freedom from tsarist corruption. The broadbacked hero, Jurgis Rudkus, is a virtuous prole whose refrain, no matter what happens to him, is "I will work harder." At the stockyards, in a reverse anticipation of Henry F orå s production line, the cows are stunned with a sledgehammer, then hung up by one leg, beheaded, skinned, and so on-deconstructed as they move past one worker after another. J urgis' s job is to sweep the gutted slops into a hole in the floor, and at first he enjoys the hard, bloody labor. Within a few months, however, he is sore and disillu- sioned. The men are forced to perform at punishing speed; they are played off against one another by management and dismissed for any kind of rebellion or in- jury. The conditions, at times, are li tde short of torture: There was no heat upon the killing-beds; the men might exactly as well have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very little heat anywhere in the build- ing, except in the cooking-rooms and such places-and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing- beds you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in news- papers and old sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked again, and so on, until by night-time a man would be walking on great lumps the size of the feet of an elephant. The force of "The Jungle" can be suggested only by quoting it at length. Sinclair's prose is fluent and forward- moving, but he rarely writes an inter- esting phrase or discovers new weight or color in a word. He builds his effects through precise reporting and the re- morseless piling up of detail; he was a master of the routines of physical labor and the gear-by-gear minutiae of in- dustrial processes. In the meatpacking scenes, he holds his rhythm steady and lets the hideous facts do their work: There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sau- sage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white-it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home con- sumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and saw- dust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. I t is the archetypal scene of industrial horror, an image that haunted the na- tion. If only Sinclair had possessed fiction-writing abilities equal to his abil- ity to evoke squalor! One lurid catastro- phe after another engulfs Jurgis Rudkus and his relatives-so many disasters that one suspects Sinclair outfitted the family with exactly those vulnerabilities which could be most grievously exploited by a brutal society. Jurgis is injured, loses his job, and takes to drink; his pretty young wife, who also works in the meatpacking district, is bullied by her foreman into be- coming his mistress; their little boy drowns in the Packingtown muck Jurgis breaks down, and Sinclair sends him reeling through the city, where he is brushed by "the hurrying throngs upon the streets, who were deaf to his entreat- ies, oblivious of his very existence-and savage and contemptuous when he forced himself upon them." Available in many editions, "The Jungle" is still widely taught in schools and colleges. It has remained a moral text if not quite a literary one. You have only to read the first few chapters of "Germinal," Zola's 1885 novel about French coal miners, to know what it feels like to be in the hands of a sensu- ally and morally alive writer who estab- lishes a tight pattern of significance rather than just laying on pages of atmo- sphere and calamity. Any kind of in- wardness was beyond Sinclair: his char- acters, suffering without any gain in consciousness, remain mere names at- tached to depressing social conditions. Jurgis falls in with criminals and corrupt politicians, and then, suddenly, at a public meeting, hè s electrified by a fer- vent voice: "They own not merely the labor of society, they have bought the governments; and everywhere they use their raped and stolen power to intrench themselves in their privileges." The book ends with J urgis' s rapid conversion to socialism and with an outpouring of blood -raising speeches inspired by the words of Eugene Debs. The last line of the novel is "CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!" But Chicago didn't become "ours," which was something that Sinclair had trouble understanding. The shock created by "The Junglè' was extraordinary, but it didn't produce what Sinclair had hoped for-outrage over the exploitation of workers, and the first steps toward the de- feat of capitalism. "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stom- ach," he later said, in perhaps his sole pub- lic witticism. Roosevelt brushed off the call for socialist revolution, and though he acted vigorously on contaminated food, his measures were neither as vigorous nor as comprehensive as Sinclair wanted. The writer, hanging around Washington, pes- tered the President with cables and pro- tests, until Roosevelt, losing patience, THE NEW YORK.ER, AUGUST 28, 2006 73